Lake lawmaker seeks safer school walking routes for students

In a move to dramatically improve safety for Florida children who walk to school, state Rep. Larry Metz filed legislation this week calling for sweeping changes in how the state identifies "hazardous" routes and mandating local governments to make fixes so kids make it to class unscathed.

Metz, a Yalaha Republican and former Lake County School Board member, said House Bill 1121 is a response to busing and safety concerns from Lake students with perilous walking routes after losing their bus rides. Lake parents and district leaders clashed in August after School Board members cut more than 4,000 bus rides for kids who live within 2 miles of campus in an effort to close a budget shortfall.

Districts are required to bus students through sixth grade who live within 2 miles of school but face dangerous walking conditions. Lake parents and residents, however, complained the current law doesn't go far enough to protect kids — something Metz hopes to change.

"We're trying to have a more clear and certain way of identifying and correcting hazardous walking conditions," he said.

Metz's bill expands what officials must consider "hazardous" and would likely result in more students in this situation getting rides — and districts having to come up with extra cash to foot the cost. According to the bill, a walk would be considered dangerous if the student must cross a six-lane highway or road with a 50-mph speed limit or higher at an intersection lacking crossing guards, a stop sign or traffic-control signal. The legislation also would require a law-enforcement officer to be involved in evaluating potentially dangerous situations.

Seminole County school-district officials already work with local law officers — along with traffic engineers and parents — to assess potentially dangerous routes, Transportation Director Kenneth Lewis said. Though it's unclear how many routes would be added because of the new criteria in Metz's bill, Lewis said he is worried it would be another state requirement with no accompanying state funding to pay the tab. School districts on average only get reimbursed from the state about half of what it actually costs to bus students. In Seminole, for instance, it costs the district $23 million to bus students, but the district gets just $10 million in state reimbursements leaving the district to pick up the rest.

"That pulls money from the classroom to put into transportation to try to meet these unfunded mandates," he said.

The Seminole district buses about 32,000 students daily. Only a fraction of those — 254 — confront hazardous-walking conditions that meet the letter of the law. In Orange County, the district buses hundreds of students across 22 different hazardous routes. Orange Senior Transportation Director Jim Beekman wrote in an email that any change without an increase from state funding will come from local dollars.

But Lake School Board member Tod Howard said he doesn't think the bill would have a big impact because students living within 2 miles of campus are cheaper to move and can be picked up on existing routes. In Lake, schools on average receive $363 in state reimbursement to bus students no matter how far they are bused to school.

"It's not like we're having to run a bus down a dirt road 8 miles," he said. "Those big, long [routes] really cost you."

But the real onus could fall on city and county governments. Under Metz's bill, these governments would be under more pressure to fix dangerous walking conditions — or face footing the entire cost of transporting a child to school. Jurisdictions would have three years to fix routes with capital improvements, but the timetable could be stretched to up to five years if more time is "reasonably required" to acquire right of way, according to the legislation.

Metz said local governments currently lack the incentive to make repairs to dangerous walking routes because the state will continue funding student bus rides across hazardous areas indefinitely. The existing law is "suggestive rather than directive," he said.

"It just says, 'Well, you should do these things. You should cooperate to fix these things,'" he said. "But there's no time frame. It's not clear."

His bill includes teeth to force governments to make changes to improve safety. After the bus cutbacks in Lake, parents complained that some walking routes lacked sidewalks and proper crosswalks. Mount Dora parent Deeanna Hutcheson tried walking to Round Lake Elementary with her stepdaughter after the fifth-grader lost busing, but Hutcheson found it frightening.

"There's a 3-foot ditch where you either walk through it or you walk in the road," Hutcheson said. Her husband ended up driving the girl to school instead. Hutcheson said no parents in the area allowed children to walk to school "because they will literally get killed."

The current law deems a route hazardous if there isn't an area at least 4 feet wide to walk alongside a busy road, but it doesn't say a drainage ditch can't be part of that space. Metz's law would exclude drainage ditches, swales and channels from that measurement.

"There are routes — and I've said this all along — that I do not believe are safe for our students to walk," Howard said. "They need to tighten up this language so we can provide better services to our students."